It’s Monday night here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and sit with us for a while. The more the merrier. We still have a few tables available. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started,
but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you how many home runs do you expect Nico Hoerner to hit this season. A solid 50 percent of you predicted “16 to 20,” which seems reasonable to me. Another 33 percent said 11 to 15, which isn’t crazy either.
Here’s the part where we listen to jazz and talk movies. You’re free to skip that part.
Tonight we’re featuring organist Freddie Roach playing a song co-written by a young Quincy Jones, “The Midnight Sun Will Never Set.” Joining Roach on his 1964 album are Joe Henderson on tenor sax, Eddie Wright on guitar and Clarence Johnston on drums.
I’m trying to catch up on my familiarity of the films of director Federico Fellini, so I watched La Strada (1954), starring Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart and Fellini’s own wife Giulietta Masina. It’s a road story (‘La Strada” means “the road”) about a brutish circus performer Zampanò (Quinn) and a developmentally-disabled young woman named Gelsomina (Masina), whom he literally buys from her mother. A lot of critics consider La Strada to be Fellini’s best movie, at least according to Roger Ebert who pointedly wrote that in contrast to his own belief that it was not. Still Ebert praised the film as a strong transition from Fellini’s Italian neorealist roots and a step towards the more dreamlike fantasy of his later pictures. I haven’t seen enough Fellini to say whether or not it was his best, but the performances of the three primary actors, in particular Masina as Gelsomina, make it a high-quality film.
Quinn’s Zampanò is a low-rent circus strongman, traveling from town to town with a crappy chain-breaking act that earns him a meager living. Gelsomina’s older sister Rosa had been Zampanò‘s assistant, but she died and now he’s back to get another sister from her destitute family. Gelsomina’s mother sells her to Zampano to replace Rosa for 10,000 lira, or about $20. Gelsomina is not quite right in the head. She is very simple-minded and quite innocent.
Zampanò obviously has had a hard life and he respond to that by being cruel and harsh to the rest of the world. He bought Gelsomina and he treats her as his property. He teaches her to be a clown in his pathetic strongman act and hits her with a stick when she gets things wrong. They both live in a small cart that is tied to his motorcycle and eventually he rapes her. However, after a time the two of them come to a kind of understanding. He even starts to introduce her to people as his wife. They meet various people along the road as Zapanò’s strongman act gets more popular. However, the real reason the act starts to take off is that Gelsomina proves to be a pretty good clown and she gets worked more and more into the act, even if Zampanò keeps her in a subordinate role through intimidation and violence. She eventually runs away, but Zampanò tracks her down, beats her, and throws her back into the cart.
Eventually the two are popular enough that they’re invited to join a circus. But also at the circus is an acrobat/high-wire artist known only as “The Fool.” (Basehart) Unlike Zampanò, The Fool is actually a talented performer. He’s also quite clever compared to the dull-witted Zampanò. The Fool and Zampanò have some sort of history together and it apparently involved Rosa. The Fool mercilessly mocks Zampanò, even unprofessionally disrupting his act during a performance. He says he just can’t help it. The Fool also takes an interest in Gelsomina, but while he treats her better than Zampanò, he also mocks her simple-mindedness.
Obviously the Fool and Zampanò are going to have a problem.
Fellini wrote La Strada for his wife and insisted upon her as Gelsomina, even when potential financial backers wanted on a bigger name. Honestly, it’s impossible to see anyone else in the role. Masina’s Gelsomina certainly borrows from Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, but you cans see in her facial expressions that there’s a lot going on in Gelsomina’s supposedly simple mind. She comes to love being a clown and performing for appreciative audiences. Her innate goodness shines through a lot of really crappy stuff. Despite the abuse, she comes to really care about Zampanò. She has several opportunities to leave him, but after a conversation with the Fool, she tells herself that her place in the world is by his side. (Who else would be? she muses.) It’s a stunning and unforgettable performance. It was so good, in fact, that Walt Disney wanted to make an animated Gelsomina feature.
Quinn is terrific as the animalistic Zampanò as well. This is not a clever or talented man, but he stays alive doing the one stupid strongman act that he’s learned by rote. He always acts to satisfy his appetites, be they financial, culinary or sexual, and he doesn’t care about the consequences. Zampanò, like an animal, is also unable to express his feelings or needs in words. He’s unable to communicate with Gelsomina with anything other than violence.
Basehart’s the Fool is a lot smarter and talented, but there is an impish cruelty in everything he does. We first see him wearing angel wings, but it’s certainly unclear whether he’s a heavenly angel or a fallen one. Probably both.
La Strada certainly is an attempt by Fellini to break free of his neorealism roots. These are characters of poverty, to be sure, but they weren’t necessarily made the way they were because of that. There are lots of shots of an Italian countryside that still hasn’t recovered from World War II and Fellini was a big fan of both circuses and the sea. But all the actors here are professionals and two of the three leads were Hollywood imports. There are also some random shots (like a horse walking across the screen for no particular reason) that hint at Fellini’s more dreamlike future works.
I should mention that I’ve had some troubles in the past getting my home speakers or earbuds to sync up the video and audio. I thought I had the problem licked, but sometimes it comes back and I thought it did with La Strada. I later found out that’s just Fellini. Like all postwar Italian directors, Fellini shot silently and the sound was added in later. Neither Quinn nor Basehart spoke Italian, so both of their parts were dubbed by other actors in the Italian-language version and Masina’s (and everyone else’s) were dubbed in the English-language version. But unlike a lot of Italian directors, Fellini didn’t really care much if the sound and the movements of the lips matched up well. In fact, a lot of the time the actors are just counting on screen and not delivering dialog at all. It’s a little disoriented, but I got used to it about halfway through at least.
La Strada was the first of four films for which Fellini won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture. It’s certainly a strong film about two society outcasts—one cruel and animalistic and the other sweet-natured but a bit dim. It avoids cheap sentimentality in favor of a memorable portrait of three flawed individuals on the fringes of society. I don’t know if it’s a masterpiece—it’s focus seems a bit narrow for that title—but it’s certainly very good. And Masina’s performance as Gelsomina is certainly one for the ages.
Here’s a trailer for the restoration of La Strada.
Yeah, I forgot to mention the Gelsomina theme and the soundtrack composed by Nino Rota, who went on to compose the music for the first two Godfather pictures, among a lot of other films.
La Strada is available on HBO Max, Criterion, Watch TCM (if you have TCM through cable or satellite) and for free on Kanopy if your library is part of that program. There also appears to be a copy on YouTube.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
When the Cubs signed catcher Carson Kelly to a two-year, $11.5 million deal before the 2025 season, I don’t think anyone would predict how well it would work out. Kelly had been a top prospect in the Cardinals system who was one of the major pieces in the trade with Arizona that sent Paul Goldschmidt to St. Louis. However, in his time with the Diamondbacks, he was never really able to establish himself as a quality starting catcher. His career batting line before the Cubs signed him was .224/.307/.373. That will keep you employed if you’re a good defensive catcher (which Kelly is), but it’s not going to earn a spot in the lineup everyday.
Somehow when Kelly turned 30 and signed with the Cubs, everything clicked. Kelly had the best year of his career in 2025 and so far, he’s been even better this year. Kelly’s career line with the Cubs is .260/.347/.433 over 133 games. Combine that with a solid defense behind the plate and Kelly has become one of the better catchers in the league.
With all the talk about players to be extended this year, Kelly has kind of gotten lost in the shuffle. Kelly does have a mutual option for 2027 for $7.5 million, but those deals are pretty much never picked up. If a number is good for the team, it’s not good for the player and vice-versa.
So can the Cubs afford to let Kelly walk after this year? On the one hand, he turns 32 years old in July and the track record of catchers into their mid-thirties isn’t great. Yes, I bet you can name some that are and I also bet that most of them are either Hall-of-Famers or guys whom at least got some consideration for Cooperstown. But even the greats are prone to breaking down at Kelly’s age. Johnny Bench was pretty much finished at 33. Joe Mauer was a full-time DH by 30.
The Cubs also have Miguel Amaya and if you hold out hope that Mosiés Ballesteros can catch, then the Cubs already have two catchers under contract for next year. There’s also Owen Ayers, who is a top 10 prospect and could be ready for the majors sometime next season. So signing Kelly to an extension, beyond the money, is that he would take up a roster spot that could be used on someone else with more versatility.
With how well Kelly is playing, I think he’s due for a big raise. Catchers, even ones that aren’t great, draw a premium because of how hard it is to find good ones. The Twins gave Victor Caratini two-years and $14 million this past winter. I think Kelly blows by that.
Maybe naívely, I think Kelly would sign a two-year deal to stay in Chicago. As desperate as teams are for catching, they aren’t falling all over themselves to give three or more years to catchers in their thirties. J.T. Realmuto got one, but one, that was probably the Phillies overpaying and two, Realmuto has been really good over the course of his career.
So I’m going to predict that Kelly pretty much doubles his deal—two years and $22 million. Would you give Carson Kelly that?
I didn’t phrase the question right and didn’t give you a chance to vote for my contract proposal being too low. So if you think it is, vote “yes” and tell me how I’m too low in the comments.
Thanks for coming by tonight. We hope you had a good time. Please get home safely. Don’t forget anything you may have checked. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow evening for more BCB After Dark.
